Tuesday, 12 April 2016

"Game of Thrones"...

My brother watches "Game of Thrones," and keeps trying to get me to watch it. "It's right up your street," were his words. I sometimes marvel that even members of my own family don't understand me, or have any idea about my taste. The little that I have seen of this series, the gratuitous depictions of sadistic sex, the foul language, the pseudo-mediaeval setting, a pagan pantheon, poor acting and just a general sense of arbitrary, tawdry nastiness together make this one of the programmes I am least likely to watch, let alone enjoy, right up there with Downton Abbey and Jerry Springer. But then I am not particularly keen on any contemporary television programme, for any number of reasons. It might use the metric system; it might have an ethnic presenter; it might be politically-correct in other ways. If it isn't bad enough leaving my house to be confronted with the modern world, I'd rather not see it on my television screen. And what I have seen of this "Game of Thrones" series suggests that it very much caters for a modern audience, who see nothing wrong with fornication, and bestiality, and not believing in the true God.

6 comments:

The first season ends with the one guy that should have been king dead. I actually went and read the book to see if this was how it was supposed to go- and it was. The entire thing is just one huge excuse to have people behaving badly to one another.

I have noticed, like with Downton Abbey, they might get a particular period set up really nice, but then they've got to put the progressive nonsense into it. The feminism must appear. I have to stop watching. Someone ought to have noticed by now that this is why we can't have nice things.

On the subject of kingship, I expect a large proportion of the audience (like my own brother) would scoff at the idea of kingship in real life. It's things like this that indicate to me that programmes like "Game of Thrones" satisfy some base need in people, a need to escape (like much other fantasy literature, like Tolkien himself but on a much lower tier) the ordinary, dreary way of life to which we're all accustomed but with the cheap disclaimer that we can't bear to part with the ideologies (like feminism) to which we blindly cling.

The whole thing just makes me cringe. I wish I could get people to understand that.

No, I wouldn't say that. Lady Rose was a flighty teenager who cavorted with the black American jazz singer as a gesture of rebellion against her parents. Lady Mary quite sensibly convinced him to dump her, and he quite sensibly complied. Certainly more sensible than the married Lady Mountbatten having an affair with Jawaharlal Nehru (which didn't happen on television but in real life).

I'm not a huge fan of 'Downton', but I did appreciate Lord Fellowes for enraging the Guardian and Independent types by portraying the aristocracy in a sympathetic light.

As for 'Game of Thrones', I'm a medievalist but have never been interested in seeing it (even after Her Majesty mentioned it by name in her Christmas Speech several years ago!).

I think it is because the main demographic is for women. Women want places like that to exist because they like having status. But they don't know how to run anything.

Now, they don't really teach us anything in schools anymore, so there's this standard idea people have that these estates were economically unsustainable. Few realize it is the progressive ideology and the ever expanding government that made these estates untenable.